Hard drive interchangeability

[funke]

Hey all. Recently the hard drive on my girlfriends windows laptop went out. I was wondering if all hard drives are interchangeable and if I could just pull the one out of my old laptop and use it. Also, how would I go about reinstalling the original software with the recovery partition being on the hard drive and no disc?

[DJAdeSands]

Yes, it's interchangeable, if the laptop's REALLY old, you won't be able to, but if it's relatively modern, using a 2.5" SATA (most use these drives nowadays) you can switch em about. But when you start going into partitioning drives and copying seperate partitions, that's when it starts getting uber technical. I would consult a computer tech forum, the answer will be there.

[Jester]

Hey mate. Ya its easy enough to swap out a harddrive to another laptop. Just be aware you will need to download all the drivers for the other laptop for anything to work (most important is the network drivers, at least then you can download the chipset, mouse, sound, video etc)
Buy a USB HD enclosure (pretty cheap) then you may be able to recover stuff from the old harddrive, unless it is totally poked.

[funke]

Thanks for the replies. My donor is four years old, so it should be similar. Aside from the drivers, I don't think there is anything that she really needs off of the bad hard drive. As far as loading the os, would I be able to instal windows and use the code on the underside of the laptop as the product key? And how would I go about loading it if I don't have working usb or disc drivers?
My only experience with this type of thing is when I replaced the hard drive on her daughters in warranty laptop. That time I simply installed the hard drive and powered it on. It did it's thing and was ready to go. Would it be possible to get a hard drive from the manufacturer with the os and drivers already installed and do the same with this one?

[DJAdeSands]

As long as the version of windows is the same, it will work, the windows install will have all the basic stuff in there, enough to get u online to find appropriate drivers,

[Jester]

Buy a $10 enclosure for the old HDD and splurge for a shiny new SSD